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Bible Encyclopedias
Hieroglyphics
Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature
or (from ἱερός , sacred, and γλύφω, to carve), the term usually applied to the inscriptions in the so-called sacred or symbolical characters on the Egyptian monuments. (See EGYPT). "They were either engraved in relief, or sunk below the surface on the public monuments and hard materials suited for the glyptic art, or else traced in outline with a reed pen on papyri, wood, slices of stone, and other objects. The scribe indeed, wrote from a. palette or canon called pes, with pens, kash, from two little ink- holes in the palette, containing a black ink of animal charcoal, and a red mineral ink. The hieroglyphics on the monuments are sometimes sculptured and plain; at others, decorated with colors, either one simple tone for all the hieroglyphs, which are then called monochrome, or else ornamented with a variety of colors, and then called polychrome; and those painted on coffins and other objects are often first traced out, and then colored in detail. On the papyri and some few inferior materials they are simply sketched in outline, and are called linear hieroglyphs. The hieroglyphs are arranged in perpendicular columns, separated by lines, or in horizontal, or distributed in a sporadic manner in the area of the picture to which they refer. Sometimes all these modes of arrangement are found together. One peculiarity is at once discernible, that all the animals and representations face in the same direction when they are combined into a text; and when mixed up with reliefs and scenes, they usually face in the direction of the figures to which they are attached. When thus arranged, the reliefs and hieroglyphs resemble a MS., every letter of which should also be an illumination, and they produce a gay and agreeable impression on the spectator. They are written very square, the spaces are neatly and carefully packed, so as to leave no naked appearance of background.
"The invention of hieroglyphs, called Neter kharu, or ‘ divine words,' was attributed to the god Thoth, the Egyptian Logos, who is repeatedly called the scribe of the gods and lord of the hieroglyphs. Pliny attributes their invention to Menon. The literature of the Egyptians was in fact called Hermaic or Hermetic, on account of its supposed divine origin, and the knowledge of hieroglyphs was, to a certain extent, a mystery to the uninitiated, although universally employed by the sacerdotal and instructed classes. To foreign nations, the hieroglyphs always remained so, although Moses is supposed to have been versed in the knowledge of them (Philo, vita Moysis); but Joseph is described (Genesis 42:23) as conversing with his brethren through interpreters, and does not appear to allude to hieroglyphic writing. The Greeks, who had settled on the coast as early as the 6th century B.C., do not appear to have possessed more than a colloquial knowledge of the language (Diod. Sic. 81, 3, 4); and although Solon, B.C. 538, is said to have studied Egyptian doctrines at Sebennytus and Heliopolis, and the doctrines of Pythagoras are said to have been derived from Egypt, these sages could only have acquired their knowledge from interpretations of hieroglyphic writings. Hecatseus (B.C. 521) and Herodotus (B.C. 456), who visited Egypt in their travels, obtained from similar sources the information they have afforded of the language or monuments of the country (Herod. 2, 36).
Democritus of Abdera, indeed, about the same period (B.C. 459), had described both the Ethiopian hieroglyphs and the Babylonian cuneiform, but his work has disappeared. After the conquest of Egypt by Alexander, the Greek rulers began to pay attention to the language and history of their subjects, and Eratosthenes, the keeper of the museum at Alexandria, and Manetho, the high-priest of Sebennytus, had drawn up accounts of the national chronology and history from hieroglyphic sources. Under the Roman Empire, in the reign of Augustus, one Chaeremon, the keeper of the library at the Serappeum, had drawn up a dictionary ‘ of the hieroglyphs; and both Diodorus and Strabo mention them, and describe their nature. Tacitus, later under the empire, gives the account of the monuments of Thebes translated by the Egyptian priests to Germanicus; but after his time, the knowledge of them beyond Egypt itself was exceedingly limited, and does not reappear till the third and subsequent centuries A.D., when they are mentioned by Ammianus Marcellinus, who cites the translation of one of the obelisks at Rome by one Hermapion, and by Julius Valerius, the author of the apocryphal life of Alexander, who gives that of another. Heliodorus, a novelist who flourished A.D. 400, describes a hieroglyphic letter written by queen Candace (4, 8). The first positive information on the subject is by Clement of Alexandria (A.D. 211), who mentions the symbolical and phonetic, or, as he calls it, cyriologic nature of hieroglyphics (Strom. 5). Porphyry (A.D. 304) divides them also into coenologic or phonetic, and cenigmatic or symbolic. Horapollo or Horus-Apollus, who is supposed to have flourished about A.D. 500, wrote two books explanatory of the hieroglyphics, a rude, ill-assorted confusion of truth and fiction, in which are given the interpretation of many hieroglyphs, and their esoteric meaning. After this writer, all knowledge of them disappeared till the revival of letters. At the beginning of the 16th century these symbols first attracted attention, and, soon after, Kircher, a learned Jesuit, pretended to interpret them by vague esoteric notions derived from his own fancy, on the supposition that the hieroglyphs were ideographic, a theory which barred all progress, and was held in its full extent by the learned, till Zoega, at the close of the 18th century (De Ornine Obeliscorum, fol. Romans 1797), first enunciated that the duals or cartouches contained royal names, and that the hieroglyphs, or some of them, were used to express sounds" (Chambers, Cyclopedia).
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